Disability Resource Center

More Alike Than Different

DRC Info

ACCESSIBLE WEB DESIGN

Most people today can hardly conceive of life without the Internet. It provides
access to information, news, email, shopping, and entertainment. At the click
of a mouse, the world can be "at your fingertips"-that is, if you
can use a mouse . . . and if you can see the screen . . . and if you can hear
the audio-in other words, if you don't have a disability of any kind.

The most universal format for perceivability is text, because it can be transformed
into light for the eyes (on a computer screen), sound for the ears (through
a screen reader), and Braille for the hands (through a Braille display).

The following resource table below, originally developed by Paul Bohman of WebAIM,
will help you in your future endeavors to try to implement principles of accessibility
in your work. For a more updated and informative list, go to Designing More Usable Web Sites from the Trace Center at the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison.

Common Web Accessibility Challenges and Solutions

Blindness

Challenges

Solutions

Images,
photos, graphics are unusable.

Provide text
descriptions, in "alt" tags and, if necessary, longer explanations
(either on the same page or with a link to another page).

Users often
listen to the Web pages using a screen reader.

Allow for users to skip over navigational
menus, long lists of items, ASCII art, and other things that might
be difficult or tedious to listen to.

Users often jump from
link to link using the TAB key.

Make sure that links make sense
out of context ("click here" is problematic).